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Health Care Quality Measurement

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Increasingly, tools and surveys are employed to determine current and optimal levels of health care service and performance, and ultimately to improve the levels for each. RAND helps policymakers, health care leaders, and practitioners determine cost-effective and accurate ways to measure the quality of health care being provided, and then recommends ways to improve the level of health care quality.

California health regulators should begin collecting physician identifiers as part of their routine data collection efforts about the services provided at the state's hospitals. Such a move would help providers improve quality by aiding efforts to benchmark performance and reduce variations in the delivery of care.

When it comes to health policy, there are two basic approaches: (1) cautious and careful, or (2) disruptive and daring. The former is less threatening, but what might happen if decision makers were more driven by creativity and less concerned about regulations?

Expanded use of clinical process-of-care measures to assess the quality of health care in the context of public reporting and pay-for-performance applications led to a desire to demonstrate its value in terms of improved patient outcomes.

The Affordable Care Act significantly increases coverage for substance use treatment, but it does not define quality measures—which are essential to monitoring and improving treatment. Thus, increased coverage may not translate into better outcomes unless existing measures are refined and new measures are developed and tested.

Changing health care pay-for-performance programs to account for differences among providers in their patient characteristics can make the incentive schemes more equitable and avoid a redistribution of resources away from providers who care for socioeconomically disadvantaged patients.

Changing health care pay-for-performance programs to account for differences among providers in their patient characteristics can make the incentive schemes more equitable and avoid a redistribution of resources away from providers who care for socioeconomically disadvantaged patients.

This article describes the current status of home-based medical care in the United States and offers a brief narrative of a fictional homebound patient and the health events and fragmented care she faces.

Health care providers are increasingly being evaluated by the quality of care they provide. Our aim was to assess the feasibility of recently developed quality indicators (QIs) for pelvic organ prolapse (POP) and identify possible deficits in care.

Patient experience with care is an essential element in any assessment of health care quality. Surveys give patients a voice and provide fair and relevant indicators that complement other metrics of health care quality to inform patients' choices and providers' decisions about how to improve care.

With increased coverage for treating substance use disorders, the Affordable Care Act presents an opportunity to improve quality of care. However, meaningful quality measures must be developed before patients, their families, and society can benefit from improved treatment.

In a reimagined approach, quality measurement in health care would be integrated with care delivery, address the challenges that confront doctors every day, and reflect individual patients' preferences and goals for treatment and health outcomes.

RAND researchers designed and field tested an Emergency Department Patient Experience of Care Survey for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for use with adult patients who have visited the emergency department.

This report describes development of the Hospice Experience of Care Survey, field test design, procedures, analytic methods and findings, and the final survey for national implementation by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

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Researcher Spotlight

Distinguished Chair in Health Care Payment Policy

Cheryl Damberg is a senior principal researcher and holds the Distinguished Chair in Health Care Payment Policy at the RAND Corporation. She is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She has more than 25 years of experience in the areas of health economics, quality measurement and…

Policy Researcher

Sangeeta Ahluwalia is a policy and health services researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her research centers on examining access to palliative care services early in the trajectory of severe chronic illness, particularly the integration of advance care planning in primary care. Her most recent…

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